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Date | Dec 01 2003

I was on a date that may or may not have been a date when a giant roach flew into my neck. We were playing pool and had stopped to talk. I had no way of knowing what had flown into me. My date, if I may call her that, told me what it was. She was upset because, as she explained it, she’s afraid of flying things.

I’ve thought about this a lot and what I’ve decided is that a date is only a date if both people think it’s a date. By the time the roach flew into me, I definitely wanted her to think this was a date, because that’s what I was thinking it was. Actually what I was thinking was more like: I hope she thinks this is what I think it is, because if she does, it is.

After flying into my neck, the roach flew off toward the front of the pool hall. I offered to go kill it, but my date said not to bother because it wasn’t a big deal. My sense however was that it was a big deal but that she didn’t want to admit how much of a deal it was because to do so made her seem girly and absurd.

The only reason I asked her on a date was because I was certain she was going to turn me down. I was having a problem with liking her, so I came up with a plan to ask her out and have her turn me down. Once she turned me down, I could let go of liking her, is how I thought of it.

All that backfired when she said yes.

At first I’d thought she’d said no. The reason I thought this is because when I asked her to play pool, she said exactly what I thought she would say, namely that she’d really like to play pool with me but was super-busy and would let me know when she had time. The words she used were the exact words I had imagined her using in order to turn me down without having to say no outright.

Oddly this made me happy. I had made a plan and the plan had worked and now I could begin to stop liking her.

The reason I wanted to stop liking her was because of how much younger she is than me. This is what I would think about then. I would lie in bed and calculate how old she was when I was certain ages, and then I’d picture the two of us at those times, standing together. It wasn’t much fun. Here’s the worst of it: On the day I first had sex, she was two years old. Do kids still wear diapers at two years old? For me to pursue someone this young, someone who may not have been potty trained on the day I first had sex, seemed gross and clichéd. As a result I tried to stop liking her so much—an effort which failed, miserably. You can’t stop yourself from liking someone. The best you can do is not write to that person and not talk to that person, but you can’t make yourself feel different things about a person just by wanting to. Deep down I knew this, and yet I still tried to will my feelings to change. When this failed, I hatched the plan of asking her out so that she would turn me down. At first I thought this had worked, but then a week later I received an email from her in which she said she finally had time to play pool with me and when could we?

At her insistence, I let the flying roach be. However I couldn’t help noticing that whenever it was my turn to hit a shot, she would do a lot of looking toward the front of the pool hall, doubtless to see where the roach had got to.

“You’re worried about the roach,” I said finally.

“Not really.”

“I’m going to go kill it.”

When I found the roach, it was dancing around a cluster of florescent lights above an empty pool table. I was holding an extra t-shirt I had, gripping it by one of the sleeves. The plan, if it isn’t obvious, was to kill the roach by doing that wrist-snapping thing boys do with towels in locker rooms. My sense was that even if I didn’t get the roach with the tip of the shirt, I could probably hit it well enough to stun it, at which point I would keep snapping at it until it was dead. If necessary, I would stomp on it.

That was the plan.

However the roach wouldn’t budge from the florescent lights and I was concerned about breaking one of the lights with my t-shirt. So after standing there for two or three minutes, I gave up and walked back to our table.

“You didn’t do anything,” she said. “You just looked at it.”

“I didn’t want to break the light.”

I would like to say we kissed then, in part because it would make such a sweet ending to the story—they kiss after he fails to be her hero—and also, mainly, because I would have liked to have kissed her. Instead, though, we returned to the game we were playing—a game she won easily, just like she won the next. Even distracted, she’s a way better pool player than me.

Later, at a bar, she told me about her boyfriend in Wisconsin. I hadn’t known about her boyfriend in Wisconsin. The moment she mentioned him, the moment she said the word boyfriend, I realized, looking down at my beer, that I definitely wasn’t on a date anymore, assuming I had been previously.